Alright gentlethems and thembos, gather round: This Is A Starter Thread to Fred Moten!!!

The best entry point into Moten is a stylistic + citational one, until it's not: Moten's work is best understood as a curatd mixtape or playlist, rather than a studio album. Citations, block quotes, and name drops bubble up throughout his work at an almost unmanageable rate.

at a glance, this could look like the daunting product of a Dude Who Reads Too Much, or an ADHD-like babble (it's how i talk, at least lol). If you dig in a bit more, you start to see it as a kind of humility. It seems like Moten doesn't want to claim anything as his own, like

he's obsessed with citational justice. and that's partly it. but this apparent obsession starts to change up the way the style is read. instead of reading as frantic name vomits, a network starts to arise. moten steps back, and one feels like a neuron being fired across

a massive, 500 year brain, both more+less than human, composed of nodes as distinct as Kant, Jose Esteban Munoz, Dubois, Saidiya Hartman, J. L. Austin, Saul Kripke, Hannah Arendt, Billie Holiday, frank b wilderson, adrian piper, marx, etc. etc. etc., into infinity.

The other way to describe it, as Moten himself would I hope like, is as an undercover freestyle or jazz improv session disseminated into a crown, with a mic handed to people who don't even know they're currently rapping or riffing. Slightly corny, but bear w me: this matters.

It's not just that this style reveals a personal commitment or politics of citation that Moten has. What he's trying to mobilize here is a fundamental metaphilosophical reorientation or gestalt shift that supervenes on a fundamental philosophical reorientation or gestalt shift

I call (in my nEw pApER, am i annoying yet) this twinned shift a shift away from: "(writing as) the subject". Understanding the intertwined nature of this to-be-avoided (meta)philosophical field is, imo, *the key* to understanding not only Moten, but the Big Brain: the ensemble.

The Big Brain, within which (rather than for which or as which) Moten speaks is what he calls, following Edouard Glissant, "Ensemble." Ensemble, for Glissant, is a social ontology (an ontology of the social): a way of organizing social life. To understand what ensemble is, listen

to this:

and to this:

Ensemble is a social life that does not erase difference. What is crucial is that this is not difference in the liberal sense; ensemble is not the same thing as the original position, or a modern liberal state. The difference is that ensemble is not a form of ORGANIZATION.

Rather, as Marquis Bey reads Moten and the ensemble within which he speaks, ensemble is anarchic. A state organization that protects and delimits difference is different from an anarchic ensemble into which difference erupts (irrupts, to use Motenese) unbidden and unbound.

Ensemble is thus not a "utopia" in the sense that it is a political state we can organize towards. Ensemble is always already happening wherever difference is irrupting (which it always is). Ensemble is just living; it's what happens before politics happen. Moten's politics isn't

ensemble, his politics is the end of politics as the reaction to ensemble. For those who need it, the distinction is a riff off of Heidegger's distinction between earth and world. Earth is the preontological, prephenomenological stuff underpinning human intelligible life.

This isn't a primitivism. The point isn't for Moten (or even for H) that earth, and thus ensemble, is some originary state we need to get back to (smooth brain, no thinky thoughts). What Moten argues is that we need to see this stuff as both prior to the present and yet not

the origin of the present. He calls this "anoriginary". It's an opportunity to rethink what it means to say that something is prior to or underpinning something else.

What is all this bizarre word salad supposed to be saying!!!! Here's the picture. We live in a world in which the only mode of living together we imagine is one defined by a rejection of living together. This is a world that stretches from apartheid states to antebellum slavery

to Kant. This is a world in which the sheer immediacy of living together with other people is mediated by a force that purports to ground living together as it seeks to annihilate it. This force isn't some metaphysical ghoul. It's just something that's been there.

It's there in Kant's lashing of the imagination to understanding, it's there in Marx's inability to hear the commodity speak, it's there in the false dichotimization of musical form and content, it's there in Louis Agassiz's disgust at the material hands of his black servers,

it's there in the "antiracist" dismay at the melodramatic upraised black power fist thrown up during OJ Simpson's trial, it's there in Israel's biopolitics, it's there in Glenn Gould's suppression of his own humming, it's there in the insistence that blackness 'is' something, it

is there is Heidegger's ontic-ontological distinction. What gathers these violences together is not that they create something, but that they are a reaction to something that they nonetheless usually end up creating: the presence of other people prior to and unbound by the

relegation and regulation of difference (which itself creates differences called "black" and "white"). The result of this picture is an extremely complex understanding how a) how systems are formed, and b) how we are formed by systems, and c) how we live lives unbound by systems

phew, this is a lot!!! i'm not done, but i'll be back to update. i can tell this is gonna be a long thread lmao

Ok so to (a). We have a way of understanding the creation of social systems (which we now see as an attempt to organize ensemble) as *antagonistic to* or *oppositional to* ensemble. Or, better, we see ensemble as antagonist or oppositional to these systems. but that fails to

actually step outside the thinking of anensemblic systems. (more on "stepping outside" in a mo.) As Moten explains most primarily in STOLEN LIFE we need to understand that anensemblic systems are BUILT ON and CONSTITUTED BY ensemble. I think this is something

@davesuarex is fully tapped into; his fantastic new paper (i have to talk w you about it!!!) sketches out this notion so well. Graham Priest, for those familiar, is also i think fully tapped into this (this is why Dialethism Is Black is a good take lol). The basic idea is that

these systems are incoherent without the internal grounding presence of ensemble. Take a Bach piano Sonata. The classical beauty of such a sonata resides in its masterful organization of tones into counterpoint, which he does based on a prior organization of tones into

keys. but keys are only "sensical", and counterpoint is only "sensical" because of the present-absence of the massive wave of all possible sonic tone - sheer difference - that you 'hear' when you hear a perfect Bach chord. anensemble doesn't get rid of or straighten out

ensemble: it is wholly dependent on its presence, which it merely covers. So too for systems like antiblackness. Antiblackness is an organizing of bodies and sounds and presences - black presence. But it can't "organize away" those bodies sounds and presences, and it's only

"legible" as exclusive by the eternal recurrence of the excluded. no one things about black people as much as people who hate black people, basically. So here's a key point: antiblackness, for Moten, isn't some antagonist interlocutor or opposition point, a city he's trying to

hold under siege. antiblackness already HAS, is already EVIDENCE OF, the presence of black people, the presence of difference. whiteness doesn't need to be "beaten" at an ontolological level; ensemble has 'already won'.

To (b) (how we are formed by these systems). Moten's view is gonna kinda follow sensically from this view. We can't understand social ontology as a schematizing process, because we can't understand the work of systems as laying out a schema (by which i mean a reduction and

regulation of difference). Systems form as a reaction to our "primordial" being (which is not primitive!!!), which is ensemble. But the result is that systems make ensemble manifest. The prime example of this is antiblackness, again. Antiblackness attempts to schematize humans

into not only racial categories, but also anensemblic categories like "the individual". But ensemble isn't erased; it manifests in a new form: mainly, black social life. Black social life - this is life moten calls "in the break" - is the irreducibility of ensemble. this is meant

twofold. First, at a literal practical level - at what heidegger would call the ontic - black folks collect themselves, gather, resist, live, even in the hold of the slave ship. Second, at a conceptual level - at what heidegger would call the ontological - black folks reaffirm

ensemble as (something like) an ontology (i'll say more about "something like" in two secs) by abandoning schematization and living in difference, living with other people. What's crucial is that for Moten, as for theorists like Nahum Chandler and Mariana Ortega, we can't

actually distinguish these two levels. The materiality of blackness captures both the "ontic" manifestations of black activity and the "ontological" conditions of possibility of such activity; the two bleed together. Moten thus picks up a third category, from Nahum Chandler:

paraontology. Paraontology is complicated, and I'm still figuring it out. The basic point is that ontology - the project of saying whatt something "is" by saying what it's n+s conditions of possibility are - is already an anensemblic attempt to regulate and reduce difference.

"Paraontology" allows us to talk about ensemble - as a slippery irreducible irruption of difference - without nailing it down "as something". This is something Moten thinks blackness illustrates by its fusion of the ontic and the ontological.

That was a bit of a tangent from the main picture, so here: the point is that for Moten, being "made" in an anensemblic system also unmakes you, because it fails to erase and indeed makes appear your ensemblic character. Moten's notion of "more+less than" is useful here.

We are both more+less than the schematized subjects these systems make us into. We are less than a coherent schema, we never quite fit the regulatory concept within which we've placed, and more than the single instantiation of that schema, because are not fitting is the result

of our belonging to an ensemble, other always already living with other people.

ALRIGHT girls: (c). (How do we live unbound by these systems). I suspect this may start to look a bit clear. the idea isn't that we differentiate ourselves from these systems, because that differentiation (a schematization) is itself a reduction and regulation of difference.

and we don't pose ourselves as an antagonist to them (in a paraontological sense; we can, i think within his story, still materially war against them!!!) because these systems already have us, already have ensemble, inside them like a germs. Instead, we become *fugitives*.

This is one of Moten's central points of return. He's taking inspiration from maroonage, the practice of black slaves smuggling themselves away from plantations to build homes in the earth upon which they've been thrown, away from the world they used to live in.

The idea is that fugitivity is the thing we do *every single day, in our myriad of ways of living together in anensemblic systems, in our myriad ways of infecting anensemble with ensemble*. Moten loves to use art as an example, and one example he uses is Frederick Douglass'

recounting of the illegible slave songs he used to hear slaves sing. Another example from Douglass is Aunt Hester's scream, which Douglass himself hears and recounts. These scenes - scenes of subjection, for Saidiya Hartman - are scenes of generativity and of fugitivty. Sheer

sonic force is somehow condition of possibility of, manifestation of, symbol of, act of, etc. of fugitivity: the presencing of ensemble - of living together - in a scene that is "supposed" to annhilate it, but will always be unable to via its own prime directive.

"Blackness", for Moten, wraps together these three modules of ensemble. Blackness displays:

1. Ensemble as a mode of living together

2. the character of ensemble as anoriginary to and constitutive for anensemble

3. fugitivity as the ability of ensemble to outstrip anensemble

4. and paraontology, as the character of ensemble by which it is not an ontological category and thus itself bound to anensemblic regulation, but is material in the sense of sheer ontic difference irrupting within the ontological

Thus: antiblackness is a privilege, in that it reveals to us the character of what is needed for us: blackness. Specifically, we need the infection of black ensemble into our entire lives. We need to live together. Moten calls this the end of the world, in service of earth.

That's the end! Thanks for reading <3 PLEASE READ FRED MOTEN. His central texts are _In The Break_, _The Undercommons_, and the consent not to be a single being trilogy (_Black and Blur_, _Stolen Life_, and _The Universal Machine_). I def suggest just flowing thru them as u like

but here's one possible reading order: _Undercommons_, _Stolen Life_, _In the Break_, _Black and Blur_, _Universal Machine_, and once again _Undercommons_